THE NEW YORKER good tahm." Originally, this had an- noyed and embarrassed me, but I was coming to see the capital that could be made of it. I began to see that my Ten- nessee speech gave me a unique person- ality, made me a character. Even the boys in the Upper School began to rec- ognize me as the boy with the "reeyul1 Southern accent," from the "reeyull Deep South." For a while, the whole Middle School was so uniformly aware of my Southern origin that during chap- el all the faces turned toward me when- ever we sang a Negro spiritual or folk song. I thought of St. Louis as a com- pletely Northern place, and there was even a period when I felt that tears might come to my eyes as I raised my voice to sing about "My Old Kentucky Home" or about "Old Virginny, the state where I was born." Sometimes when I talked about Tennessee, I re- alized that I was imitating my father and repeating things he had said about Grandma's farm, and I remembered the old times, when I was a motherless boy whose only vestige of a permanent home was the farm where my mother had grown up and where I had spent the first ten summers of my life. If, for a moment, a cloud of self-contempt cast a shadow over my other feelings, the cloud soon passed away and I basked in the glorious attention of my class- mates. Most of the boys were properly amused by the pose I had assumed, but a few of them took a serious, romantic view of it. And I cared quite as much for the one kind of attention as for the other. Alone in my room, I would, indeed, sometimes examine my own af- fectations, and as I considered all this Southern business, I would wonder whether the South as a region really did exist and whether there was any actual difference between the people of the two parts of the country. If there was not-and I usually told myself that there was not-then how did such myths come into being? Why did grown people invent such ideas and keep them alive? I knew too little of history to look for an explanation there, and besides the whole thing did not seem very important to me. Usually, I would dismiss the subject without much thought. One night, as I turned over in hed, a long train of early memories of the sum- mers at Grandma Lovell's began to pass through my mind. I recalled how I had once wanted to be like my cousins who lived there, just as I now tried to be like the boys at Country Day. And surely that life did seem remote, and the people of another race, but I could not " \.' :: 'I'.' . .: . :, .: I ? : ,; ò'\ . .' ' ;1. . ""' 1 I \ 27 - . t. . . ;.. ;, .. I d/aJ "Karl Marx say. . .)) . determine whether or not they seemed so merely because that was the country and this was the city. I thought about this for a long while. Then I thought again of myoId longings to be a farm boy, like my cousins. I kept going back to that, though at first I could not say why. I recollected the shame I used to feel at my own failures on the farm, especially when I heard Grandma say, "The place for a boy is on a farm. There's nothing so green as a city boy in the country," and when I heard Fa- ther say, "Quint's a city boy, and I want him to stay one. What you learn on a farm don't help you much in hard- ware." The memory of it all was a tor- ture to me. More painful still was the memory that I had allowed my shame to turn me against my grandmother and make me submit to being taken away from her forever by my father. There had been a real struggle between the two over me, and by siding with Father I had used their struggle to escape my own problems. I knew that my father would have permitted me to live on the farm the year around if I had begged to, but instead I had been eager to get away from the country and from Grandma. I thought now of the boy I might have been in the place where I was born, and I felt that that was the boy I should have been. It seems ridiculous now, but the notion that . I ought to have loved 111Y grandmoth- er as I actually loved my stepmoth- er, and the whole sense I had of my own failure and guilt, and, above all, my fantastic notIons of the strong character '-' I might have developed if I had chosen to live on the farm so disturbed me that I resolutely shut off my memory and persuaded myself that I was quite happy. The following morning I refused to hink about these things, and after a few days I had put them out of my head com- pletely. Yet thereafter my pose as the Southerner was always distasteful to me, and I tried to avoid the words that had made my friends in school laugh and say that my accent was the "reeyul1 thing." I refused to talk at all ahout Tennessee. I DID not refuse to talk about other things, though. I talked so much that I used to wonder about it myself. I was not satisfied just to try to excel on the playground and in the classroom I wanted to he recognized as a wit and to express some original opinion on every subject. For a while, this new passion deprIved me of all self-consciousness; it was as though a great store of energy had suddenly been released from within me, and I never knew myself what undertaking it would prompt me to next. I was by no means quick in my stud-